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[Recorded: April 2008] Charles Babbage (1791-1871), computer pioneer, designed the first automatic computing engines. He invented computers but failed to build them. The first complete Babbage Engine was completed in London in 2002, 153 years after it was designed. Difference Engine No. 2, built faithfully to the original drawings, consists of 8000 parts, weighs five tons, and measures 11 feet long. OVERVIEW - In London, during the summer of 1821, Charles Babbage, inventor and mathematician, is poring over a set of astronomical tables calculated by hand. Finding error after error he finally exclaims 'I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam'. His appeal to machinery, in one of the most resonant utterances of the 19th century, was the start of a new era of automatic computation. It was not only the grindingly tedious labor of verifying a sea of figures that exasperated Babbage, but their daunting unreliability. Engineering, astronomy, construction, finance, banking and insurance depended on printed tables for calculation. Ships navigating by the stars relied on printed tables to find their position at sea. The stakes were high. Capital and life were thought to be at risk. Babbage embarked on an ambitious venture to design and build mechanical calculating engines to eliminate the risk of human error in the production of printed tables. The 'unerring certainty of machinery' would solve the problem of human fallibility. His work on the engines led him from ...